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Astronomers analyzing debris from a comet that broke apart last
summer spied pieces as small as smoke-sized particles and as
large as football-field-sized fragments. But it's the material
they didn't see that has aroused their curiosity. Tracking the
doomed comet, named LINEAR, the Hubble telescope and the Very
Large Telescope in Chile found tiny particles that made up the
2,000-mile-long dust tail and 16 large fragments, some as wide as
330 feet. But the telescopes didn't detect any intermediate-sized
pieces. If they exist, then the fundamental building blocks that
comprised LINEAR's nucleus may be somewhat smaller than current
theories suggest.

The Hubble picture shows that that LINEAR's nucleus has been
reduced to a shower of glowing "mini-comets" resembling the fiery
fragments from an exploding aerial firework. This picture was taken
with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on August 5, 2000, when
the comet was at a distance of 64 million miles (102 million
kilometers) from Earth.